Trying KDE

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In light of the announcement that openSUSE 11.2 and later will have KDE as the default desktop, I installed milestone 6 of 11.2 (barely beta quality, but much improved from earlier Milestones) and had a look at KDE for the first time since, oh, SLE9. I should further note that the Slackware servers I've run at home since college have had GNOME by preference pretty much since Gnome came available.

My first reaction? It probably matched what a lot of long-time Windows users had when they saw Vista for the first time and wanted to do something that wasn't run a web browser:
Dear God, I can't find anything, and none of my hotkeys work. THIS SUCKS!
In time I calmed down. I installed gnome, and lo it was good. I also noted certain settings that I needed on the KDE side. I switched back and explored some more. Found out where they kept the hotkeys. Found out where the sub-pixel hinting settings were hiding. This made my fingers and eyeballs happier.

Now that I've tried it for a while, in fact I'm posting from it right now, it's not that bad. Another desktop-dialect I can learn. I've gotten over that initial clueless flailing and have grasped the beginnings of the basic metaphor of KDE. I still prefer the Gnome side, but we'll see where I go in the future.

2 Comments

Back in the day, Gnome was the ONLY good option for GUI in XWindows on Linux. KDE looked like it was designed by a kid with Crayons. And, while I'm like you and still generally prefer Gnome, it's only recently that KDE has finally gotten something like a nice looking interface. In fact, I remember when I saw OS X that I thought it looked remarkably like Gnome and, since Apple sets the GUI standard, that has got to tell you something, right?

"Back in the day, Gnome was the ONLY good option for GUI in XWindows on Linux"It is debatable, for some people, Gnome interface is quite far from nice, not to mention its usability madness which always swaps ok and cancel button.